[lojban] Re: gleki xisri'i

[Minimiscience <minimiscience@gmail.com>]

de'i li 26 pi'e 12 pi'e 2008 la'o fy. Cyril Slobin .fy. cusku zoi skamyxatra.
> To Robin: after a cup of tea, the problem seems to me worse then
> before. I don't remember the exact CLL wording, but it is some
> informal English prose like "terminators may be omitted unless this
> leads to ambiguity", right? As a formalization of this informal
> English prose, we have the official yacc-based parser with it's shift
> over reduce preference, right? But this formalization fails in the
> example above! Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe there is one
> and only one way to restore the omitted terminators there:
> 
>   nu le broda KU broda KEI
> 
> Therefore, by definition, there is no ambiguity, and the phrase is
> correct. But the official parser rejects it! So, I think, we should
> either (1) decide that parser is always right, and clarify English
> wording, or (2) make a better parser. Or am I missed something?
.skamyxatra

I interpret that rule as meaning to say "unless a change in meaning results"
and treat the grammar as always shifting.  Forcing "{nu le broda broda}" to
contain an implicit "{ku}" in the middle leads to too many problems.  Among
other things, if you want to answer a "{ma}" question with a {sumti} that
contains a {tanru}, you have to add a seemingly superfluous "{ku}" onto the end
in order to keep the {tanru} from being broken into a {sumti} descriptor and a
{selbri}.  Moreover, where would the "{ku}" be placed in "{nu le broda brode
brodi}"?  Designing the parser such that it rewrites constructs that don't work
would ... well, it probably wouldn't be LALR(1) unless you took the
brute-force, grillion-productions approach, and it would definitely lend weight
to the idea of an impossible Lojban CFG.  If this unintuitive "implicit
terminator insertion in the middle of constructs" approach is how Lojban is
meant to work, I would really, really like to hear the rationale for it, among
other things.

mu'omi'e la'o gy. Minimiscience .gy.

-- 
do ganai ka'e tcidu dei gi djuno lo dukse


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